#25
Uplands

Toward noon on the first day of October 2006, not long after my 55th birthday, a catamaran that friends and I had sailed across a glittering sea from O'ahu came in under the northwest cliffs of Kauai. A big broad-headed shark had flanked us the entire trip. My companions, four islanders in their 80s, identified the creature as their tutelary spirit. The channel crossing, a frightful escapade for me, a non-swimmer, proved an exuberant and triumphant procession for them. They believe the world is made of light and the night sky proves this. The stars are shards left over from the world's construction. One of the contractors who helped gather the light to build the world is the shark, and its attendant presence in the broken blues of the sea proved our purpose sacred.

A small beach inset in the cliffs offered no sign of habitation. Black terns rose and settled on the rocks. Anchored in the lee of the cove, our boat rode steady while two of the islanders and I waded ashore across a low bar, up to our chins in green water. Well, they swam, I waded, eyes swiveling, searching for that big shark.

The two who remained on board weighed anchor, and when the catamaran fell downwind, trades thumping in the sail, scudding along the coast to the village where it would await our return three weeks later, my heart sank. I didn't want to be here. But I had made a promise, years ago, to a goddess that I would complete this pilgrimage to her holy ground, and promises are round things that come back to us wearing the shine of memories they have collected along the way.

My companions, familiar with this inlet, followed stream paths that conducted us on a tortuous and steep climb into the ancient mountains. By late afternoon, we arrived among the dragonflies and limpid breezes of the upland meadows. Here we spent our first night under the shards of creation. I am the merry cook wherever we wander. Food must be whipped up with song and laughter or my elderly friends will not eat what I prepare, which for our first supper on this trip happened to be red lentils and rice with some java plums we found along the way.

These old men are stonemovers. That's my name for them. They call themselves 'Elemakule: old man. Outwardly, in dress and manner, they seem no different from other geriatric locals, but they are uncommonly strong and limber as acrobats. And they daily commune with spirits.

They came to Kauai to reassemble the foundation stones of a temple that had fallen into disuse several centuries prior. I came to affirm the direction of my literary career. Thirty years earlier, I had dedicated my work to the goddess, the Muse of my ancestors. I knew then the stakes were high. I risked ruin. But, of course, failure is not a surprising outcome for writers. Herman Melville leaps to mind. And a quote from Carl Jung's Collected Works, volume XVII, chapter 7: "The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths".

There's a longer story detailing the accrued obligations to these spry old men that delivered me to that mountain slope of shining pines, glittering spider webs and greenfinches. The sufficient cause is my willingness to make a new start as a creative writer.

Reason takes a rest in the company of the stonemovers. That first night, they brusquely shook me awake, gabbling with excitement. The goddess had come down to our meadow to greet us. The deity to whom they frantically referred is a local divinity, Kapo-'ula-kina'u, goddess of sorcery, who had created the valley where I live.

I sat up, slapped my eyeglasses to my face and beheld a woman standing absolutely still in the chinked light of the pines, bare breasted, wearing a traditional plant-fiber waist wrap, crow-black hair sinuous in the mountain wind. Her eyes glowed oddly, like streaks of light.

Stricken with awe, I sat upright. At the edge of the black forest under silhouetted fins of mountains and splashes of stars, she shone violet. Her tomfool, I walked right toward her. I got close enough to see her expression, an existential face, sad and wise. She smiled.

Clouds closed to utter night. The earth shrank -- and she vanished!

Impish masters of pranks, jokes, antics and games, the stonemovers have gulled me time and again. My first expectation was the sonic assault of their guffaws. Instead, I found those two rascals with their faces pressed to the ground. They timorously peeked up at my approach, aghast to find me still alive.

With urgent hands, they built a fire and spent the remainder of the night close to the flames fully awake and in complete silence. They have said nothing about that apparition since, and whenever I broach the subject, they behave as if I'm not there.

The morning following that visionary night, we ascended among gnarled thorn shrubs to the vibrant, luminous slopes where we would gather rocks for the next seventeen days. All my worldly pursuits and our inevitable end retreated beneath a vast sky of cumulus swarms, sword flash sunrays, bursts of rain, then sun again and dervish mists off higher ridges, and more sun dragging iridescent cloud shadows across the mountain faces.

A fissure opened in my being, a sense of unreality. Nothing paranormal occurred during those strenuous days; yet, the temporal world felt annulled. The work exhausted me, and I slumbered dreamlessly each night so that sleep became mere punctuation. By day on those vertiginous heights, I opened to an awareness of a new psychic limit, a plenitude elaborated out of life's eroticism and nature's superabundance. I experienced then an interior transfiguration.

So, here I am now, almost two months later finally finding the necessary totality to write again. Shortly after returning, I heard from the publisher of my latest novel (Killing with the Edge of the Moon) -- a request to write more Young Adult fiction. That's the first request from a publisher for a novel I've received in seven years, and I took that as a sign of the new direction I had been seeking when I went to Kauai. Maybe the smile of the goddess had sanctioned the new beginning I craved. But the creative impulse, my ration of the eternal, proved difficult to take in hand. Weeks in the uplands had saturated me with estranging feelings, a sublime sense of the ineffable.

There is no beginning, middle or ending to this flux we summon to mind as reality. That is an Aristotelian rite. After experiencing the astonishing audacity of the natural world directly, as I did in the uplands of Kauai, words fail inevitably. All universalizing of experience is a lie. And that lie is the glorious domain of the fiction writer.

I'm finding it harder to lie the older I get. I possess less strength to derange the world into stories. Is that what the goddess' smile meant? Did she see through me?

In bewilderment, I come before you. Our relationship is an intimacy of solitude and communion. There is no sentiment in our intimacy. You don't know me, or I you. Yet, here I am inside you. Here I am where only you can remit my exile.

I don't know if I can write another novel. The stonemovers think me mad to write at all. "Sentenced to the sentence" is one of their derisive expressions. But they didn't see the goddess smile.

If you've read this far, I think you did.